Hedge Fund Nomad Turns Art Dealer, Opens Her U.K. Gallery

"Just Like a Buddha!," a diptych by Reza Derakshani. The Iranian artist's work will be the first show at Kashya Hildebrand's new gallery in London, opening June 26 on Eastcastle Street. Source: Galerie Kashya Hildebrand via Bloomberg

June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Born in Pakistan, Kashya Hildebrand
spent 19 years working on Wall Street before starting anew as an
art dealer in Geneva. In keeping with a life she characterizes
as nomadic, she’s now moving her gallery to London from Zurich.

Hildebrand, 52, was a partner at the hedge fund Moore
Capital Management LLC in New York until 2000. It was there she
met her husband, Philipp Hildebrand, who quit as president of
the Swiss National Bank last year. He resigned under political
pressure after dollar purchases made by his wife three weeks
before the SNB imposed a currency cap.

An SNB audit of the transactions, published three months
after he quit, cleared Hildebrand of any wrongdoing. He is now
vice chairman at BlackRock Inc. in London and the family has
moved to join him there. Kashya Hildebrand opens her new gallery
in London’s Fitzrovia neighborhood on June 26.

“For me it’s a dream,” says Hildebrand, whose gallery
focuses on artists from Iran, Syria and other Middle Eastern
countries. “I am excited about it. A lot of people from the
Middle East are choosing to have second homes in London as safe
havens, and so you have the affluence, the dynamism, the
multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.”

Police Raids

Her opening exhibition will feature the work of Reza
Derakshani, an Iranian painter inspired by Persian miniatures.
He left Iran in 2010 and divides his time between Dubai and
Austin, Texas. The show’s title, “Pink House Stories,” alludes
to police raids on parties in his native country. Prices range
from $80,000 to $125,000.

“Our program is a very eclectic mix,” Hildebrand says in
an interview in her Zurich gallery, whose last show features an
Austrian artist, Robert Schaberl. “I have straddled three
continents for most of my life and really resonate with what is
going on in the Middle East and Iran in terms of art.”

Mirroring the region’s politics, the market for Middle
Eastern art is volatile, Hildebrand says. She gives the example
of United Nations sanctions against Iran in force since 2006.

“There have been some exogenous pressures creating price
volatility,” she says. “Some of the bigger names people are
starting to focus on are artists from Iran. Just as their
auction prices were making new highs, the sanctions started
kicking in, so suddenly a lot of affluent people from the
Persian community who were hit by these sanctions started
selling some of their personal assets to get liquidity.”

Greenspan, Oil

Trim and elegant in a neat blue-and-white summer dress,
Hildebrand says her hedge-fund background is helpful in the art
world, though she was “very naive” about the market when she
first set up as a dealer.

“What I loved about my work at a hedge fund was that
exogenous news events would impact the markets in a very serious
way,” she says. “I still remember the day when it was
announced that Paul Volcker was being replaced by Alan Greenspan
at the Fed, or how the Iran-Iraq war impacted on oil. This idea
of a commodity, of supply and demand, of events structuring the
narrative, exists in the art market too.”

The new London gallery will be on Eastcastle Street in the
Fitzrovia neighborhood, which Hildebrand says is “kind of like
Chelsea was 15 years ago -- young, emerging, contemporary.” She
said an Istanbul gallery plans to set up across the street and
an Asian gallery is also opening there.

“In the next year this will really be the vibrant
center,” Hildebrand predicts.

Royal Clients

Among her clients, she says, are different strands of the
royal families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Hildebrand attended the
Art Dubai fair seven years ago and is now a regular, she said.

“I was fascinated by the multiculturalism of Dubai,” she
said. “It’s an hour away from Kabul, from Karachi, from Tehran,
from Damascus -- the big hotspots today, and yet everyone was
living in total calm and respect for each other and you could
just see the moment for cultural dialog, these markets starting
to burgeon and emerge.”

London may prove a better market for her artists than
Zurich, she says.

“People love to talk about Switzerland as a very
sophisticated center for art and I am sure it is,” she says.
“Swiss people on average speak three or sometimes four
languages and they travel, they are very cosmopolitan and
worldly. There is a lot of affluence here -- a big banking and
financial community.” Yet Zurich, she says, is “very
conservative.”

“In London you have a lot more ethnic diversity,” she
says. “Here we are cutting edge, but in London it is much more
the norm.”

(Catherine Hickley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. Any opinions expressed are her own.)